Chapter 50: Kemushi: abandonment issues
“I can't believe you're acting this way,” she said.
“I just don't think you're ready,” Dr. Wu's voice replied. “Why now? What's so special about today?”
They were in his office, the smallest of the buildings in the Enclave, set apart from the others for privacy. She could tell it from the others by the different note her clogs made on his steps.
Am-heh waited for her at the edge of the forest. He'd seemed surprised that she was uncertain how to leave the Realm without logging out.
“Don't you see the irony?” she asked Wu. “For years you've been trying to push me into leaving, into socializing more. And now that I finally want to, you aren't supportive! It sounds for once like I'm not the one with abandonment issues.”
Wu's chair scraped the floor as he stood up. His footsteps became fainter and stronger, then fainter again: he was pacing.
At last she heard him exhale. “You're right, Woolly Bear,” he admitted. “Maybe I never expected you to change your mind about it.” His chair squeaked as he sat down again. “But it's just not convenient for me to go exploring with you right now. Akira's therapy is reaching a crucial stage, and I need to be here for her.”
“I wasn't expecting you to accompany me,” she told him.
Squeak! went the chair, followed by the sounds of more pacing. “You're right, of course, that I want you to climb out of this cocoon, Kemushi,” his voice said. “But leaving by yourself? It's out of the question!”
“Doctor Wu,” she said, forcing herself to remain calm, “are you my therapist...or my jailer? Is this a therapeutic setting you expect me to leave, or is it a padded cell, and all the talk about leaving was just that – talk? I am a voluntary patient, after all.”
She kept her hands folded in her lap by sheer willpower. I will not clench my fists, or give him any excuse for saying I am out of control, she thought.
When he didn't answer her, she sighed. “I wasn't planning on going by myself,” she said.
“Is it one of the other patients? Because if it is–”
“No,” she said. “I'll find someone else.”
“Your imaginary Hermit? The Eternal Man, Tsuneo?”
“He agrees that I should go,” she admitted, “but he won't go with me. He is too reclusive to consider it.”
“Because he doesn't exist. Just wait a week or two,” he begged. “After I get Akira through this phase, I can get one of my assistants to step in–”
“No,” she said, firmly. “It's now or never. I swear to you, if you don't let me go, I will stop cooperating with you completely! If my doctor has become my warden, I shall rot in this cell until my old link bed finally malfunctions. Then I'll die and escape from you that way. We both know you can't force me, and you can't risk using electroshock again.”
She felt a little guilty about playing the malfunction card, preying on his fears of losing his oldest patient. But she gritted her teeth mentally and told herself to stay strong. It's my life! she thought.
More sounds of pacing. “I don't like it,” he grumbled. “You're really putting me in a bind here. Either way you could get hurt. This is a safe, controlled environment for you. It's not the same in other Realms. So many risks. And if that happens, if I lose you...”
His voice faltered, then resumed. “Even if I survive that, emotionally, it could finish me here. If the Directors decided I was at fault, I could be dismissed from the Institute. Then I'd lose not only my chance to help you, but all my other patients as well.”
He's a good man, she thought, but reverse transference has set in. Rather than me becoming emotionally dependent on him, it's the other way round. Deliberately, she softened her voice. “It will be all right, Dr. Wu. I'm not leaving to hurt myself, I promise.”
“I'm prepared to believe that. But why now? What's different about now?”
Kemushi decided he was ready for some more truth; it was time to drop the big one. “Because my vision has begun to come back,” she said. “I wasn't planning on relying on voice menus.”
The sounds of pacing halted. “What? When? Are you sure?”
“Of course I'm sure. I didn't want to tell you until I knew the trend would continue,” she told him. “I didn't want you getting worked up and pushing for more, if it turned out to be nothing.”
Squeak! went the chair as he seated himself again. “This, I want to believe,” he said after a pause.
Kemushi reached up and untied her blindfold, refusing to allow the fear to prevent her. This is silly, her inner physicist said. I know there are no photons here. It's a computer simulation feeding directly into my awareness. How could a piece of imaginary cloth block imaginary light?
But of course it could. The computer doing the simulation knows whether you think your eyes are covered or not. Just as it knows if you have lit an imaginary candle. This has to work.
The darkness in her mind lightened a little. She could see, a little at least. She was certain it would improve.
She looked about his little office. “Your candle is nearly used up,” she said. “You need to light another one, or tell the system to stop being so realistic and let it last longer.”
She turned her head and looked at Dr. Wu. “You have more hair than I remember. Either you've tweaked your avatar out of vanity, or the likeness is accurate and you finally broke down and accepted scalp regeneration treatments.”
Her vision was still fuzzy, but clear enough to see he was gaping at her. “Proof enough for you? Or do you want to ask 'how many fingers' to make sure?”
Wu turned his head away, but not before she caught a flash of reflection from his cheek. Was he crying? “Give me three days,” she said quietly. “Three days to look for my family. If I can't find them by then, I'll come back and cooperate with your therapy, I promise.”
“And if you do?”
“Then I'll still come back,” she said. “'I'll log out of here, sit up, and pull the tubes out of my own body. You'll take credit for curing your hardest case...and I'll start living in the real world again. Because I'll have something to live for.”
Gamers and Gods: AES Page 58
